Person and Action, Corner stone of the anthology of Karol Wojtyla / John Paul II

Abstract

Karol Wojtyla knew very early that the antidote to ideologies that threaten human dignity is to have a comprehensive vision of man. He reached this conviction as the fruit of his own spiritual life developed in the historical-personal circumstances that he had to live. From his second article called "The Mystery and the Man" (1951), he did not stop indicating that only Christ teaches each man who is the man and his inalienable dignity. At the same time, he began a strictly rational path in order to show everyone, regardless of his religious creed, that the human being is a person called to interpersonal communion. This task was carried out in the Chair of Ethics that he directed at the Catholic University of Lublin, relying on what he called “fundamental human experience”. Later he captured it in various writings that have their utmost expression in his work Person and Action. In this article we try to explain that this work is the culmination of his philosophical production and that it lends itself to a continuation by other thinkers. His vision of man would remain incomplete without briefly adding some points of his theological anthropology with which the present writing concludes.